Six Roles, One Semester: What Organizational Behavior Core Taught Me

Spring 2025

Every MBA core class promises to make you a “better leader.” Tanya Menon’s Organizational Behavior course at Fisher (Spring 2025, Tuesday evenings) actually broke that promise down into something testable: six specific roles, each with its own diagnostic tools, and a stack of case studies designed to make you fail at them safely before you fail at them for real.

The framing she opened with stuck with me more than any single concept: organizations are “concealed rules games.” Nobody hands you the rulebook. You infer it by playing, the rules shift depending on who’s watching, and everyone else is quietly playing by a different version of the same game. The entire course was basically a toolkit for reading that hidden rulebook faster.

The Networked Leader

We started with the John Mitchell case, the story of a guy who walks into a new organization with every formal advantage (Harvard MBA, real title) and still gets steamrolled, because he mistakes his job title for actual power and never maps the informal network around him. The diagnostic tool for avoiding his fate is the 6-Force Model: your power comes from your communication network, your resources, your allies, your formal authority, your department, and your reputation, and most people only ever think about the fourth one.

Two ideas from this section keep showing up in my own thinking. First, power vacuums and structural holes: the gaps in an organization where formal authority is weak or two groups aren’t talking to each other are exactly where an individual contributor can create outsized value by stepping in. Second, the clique vs. broker tradeoff: tight networks give you support and efficient execution, broker networks give you diverse information and creative range, and most people default to whichever one their personality prefers rather than choosing deliberately. The Shane Battier “No-Stats All-Star” case was the best illustration of this, a player with unremarkable individual stats whose teams won dramatically more with him on the floor, because he was greasing the coordination between teammates in ways box scores don’t capture.

This section also introduced psychological safety (Edmondson’s definition: freedom to take interpersonal risk without fear of humiliation) as the precondition for any of the network stuff to work. Tools like Toyota’s Andon cord and the Rose/Thorn/Bud check-in exist to manufacture that safety deliberately rather than hope for it.

The Wise Decision Maker

This module runs on the Madsen-Clayton negotiation case, and the through-line is anchoring: whoever makes the first number sets the frame, and even absurd or irrelevant anchors pull everyone’s adjustments toward them. The McDonald’s hot-coffee case (Liebeck v. McDonald’s) was the applied version: a jury’s “fair” damages number moved by hundreds of thousands of dollars depending on entirely arbitrary reference points.

The bigger idea underneath the case studies is that fast, intuitive decisions aren’t inherently bad. They’re bad when they’re built on junk variables instead of diagnostic cues. The fix isn’t “always slow down,” it’s “find out which of your instincts are actually predictive and throw out the rest.” We applied this directly to hiring: the Schmidt & Hunter research shows reference checks, years of experience, and even unstructured interviews are nearly worthless predictors of job performance, while structured interviews, work samples, and blind evaluation are dramatically better, and most organizations still hire on the worthless signals because they feel more intuitive.

The Persuasive Influencer

Menon’s framework here is her own three-part model: make your ask psychologically easy (Ego), socially easy (Social), and physically easy (Physical). Concretely, that means disarming self-interest by naming your own downside first, offering choice but capping it around three options (more than that and participation drops; the 800,000-worker retirement plan study is the standard proof), leaning on social proof from similar others rather than raw statistics, and removing the friction between someone’s intention and their actual behavior (defaults and opt-in/opt-out framing move behavior more than argument does).

The real reframe, though, was moving away from “rational argument” altogether. The standard model of persuasion, “I’m right, here are my reasons,” requires the other person to essentially admit they were wrong, which is a terrible incentive structure. The alternative taught here: don’t prep reasons, prep questions. Don’t assume you know the goal, the process, or who the real players are: there’s usually a hidden agenda and hidden constraints on the other side. And don’t treat it as a single-issue negotiation; multi-issue framing (salary or flexible schedule or development budget) creates room to actually enlarge the pie instead of just splitting it.

The Conflict Manager

The Rooftop Deck role-play (a three-way condo dispute) was the vehicle for this module, and the two frameworks worth keeping are the Fundamental Attribution Error (we explain our own bad behavior by circumstance and everyone else’s by character flaw) and Gottman’s Four Horsemen (criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling) as the communication patterns that reliably predict relationship breakdown, in a condo dispute or a marriage.

The conflict-styles grid (Dominating, Avoiding, Compromising, Accommodating, Integrating, plotted on concern for self vs. concern for other) is a genuinely useful self-diagnostic. Most people have a strong default style and don’t realize how situationally inappropriate it is half the time. The coalition dynamics were the most counterintuitive part: short-term domination in a three-party dispute reliably produces long-run lose-lose outcomes, because the excluded party can always retaliate in a way that collapses the whole structure.

The Synergy Creator

Class notes on the Speed Ventures case get at something uncomfortable: groups are not automatically good protection against bad decisions. The case is built around confirmation bias and what Karl Popper called the failure to seek falsifiable evidence: teams that poll each other and find agreement stop looking for disconfirming data, when agreement is exactly the moment they should look harder. It connects to the Challenger disaster and to why groupthink and bystander effects happen even among smart, well-intentioned people.

The practical payoff was busting the myth of freeform brainstorming. Decades of research show individuals generate more and better ideas alone than in unstructured groups, largely because groups default to letting the highest-status voice fill the silence. The fix is structure: a team contract, explicit roles, visible individual accountability, and asking questions (“what’s missing here?”) instead of jumping straight to proposed solutions.

Applying It: What Actually Happened

The course’s required essay asks you to dissect a moment where your own team lost value, using the organizational architecture lens (strategy, capability, structure, process, incentives) and the networked-leader concepts. Writing mine surfaced something I hadn’t named before: my team spent months building a dashboard for a stakeholder, only to discover, at 80% complete, that another team had already built something nearly identical. Running it back through the course’s own diagnostics, the failure wasn’t a skills gap, it was a structural hole: two teams moving toward the same goal with zero visibility into each other, and no one playing the broker role that could have surfaced the overlap early. No process existed to check for duplicate work, and there was no incentive anywhere in the system to encourage cross-team information sharing. It’s a clean example of why “just work harder” doesn’t fix problems that are actually architectural.

The Takeaway

If there’s a single thread connecting all six roles, it’s this: almost every organizational failure in this course (Mitchell’s fall, the anchoring traps in Madsen-Clayton, the persuasion barriers, the condo conflict spiral, Speed Ventures’ groupthink, my own team’s duplicated dashboard) comes from someone confidently operating on an incomplete or wrong model of the game they’re actually playing. The six roles aren’t six separate skills so much as six different angles on the same discipline: get better at diagnosing the actual rules, incentives, and hidden players around you before you act.